How to use digit separators for Python integer literals?

Question

Is there any way to group digits in a Python code to increase code legibility? I’ve tried ' and _ which are digit separators of some other languages, but no avail.

A weird operator which concatenates its left hand side with its right hand side could also work out.

Asked By: Utkan Gezer

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Source

Answer 1

Update a few years later: Python 3.6 now supports PEP515, and so you can use _ for float and integer literal readability improvement.

Python 3.6.1 (v3.6.1:69c0db5, Mar 21 2017, 18:41:36) [MSC v.1900 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> 1_1000
11000
>>>

For historical reference, you can look at the lexical analysis for strict definitions python2.7, python3.5 …

For python3.6.0a2 and earlier, you should get an error message similar to:

Python 3.6.0a2 (v3.6.0a2:378893423552, Jun 13 2016, 14:44:21) 
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5666) (dot 3)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> 1_000
  File "<stdin>", line 1
    1_000
        ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
>>> amount = 10_000_000.0
  File "<stdin>", line 1
    amount = 10_000_000.0
                      ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

Answered By: mgilson

Answer 2

There is no such function in Python but it was proposed to integrate it in the future.

You can see the proposal in the PEP515.

Answered By: Hamlett

Answer 3

The closest thing I’ve seen in python is 12 * 1000 * 1000, which is not ideal, but can be useful if 12000000 is needed. Be advised though, while in C, those are equivalent, because at compile time it converts both to the same thing, python may not share this optimization.

Answered By: TemporalWolf

Answer 4

Currently there is no thousands separator in Python, but you can use locale module to convert string with such separators to an int:

import locale
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '')
locale.atoi("1,000,000")

Answered By: scope

How to use digit separators for Python integer literals?

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